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This paper presents a discourse analysis of publications of the Christian Reformed Church regarding its Rehoboth Mission near Gallup, New Mexico, among the Navajo. All issues of The Banner, Acts of Synod of the Christian Reformed Church, the Rehoboth Hospital Bulletin, and the Annual Report of the Rehoboth Mission from 1880 to the present were reviewed for references to health-care at Rehoboth from 1903 to 1943. Four religiously framed discourses were identified: discourses justifying provision of health-care at the mission, discourses of the Navajos as immature and potentially dangerous, needing to be civilized, discourses of cleanliness, and discourses of calling. This paper adds to a growing body of knowledge about religious frames within which nurses have practiced in North America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an ideal type process which considers any patient, his intimates and hospital chaplain in the wider setting of personal care. It calls attention to an important aspect of patient care which offers a starting point from which to begin assessing the needs of any patient from a complementary perspective. The paper reveals two important consequences of the features of any patient situation for the structuring of whole patient care. The first is that the ill person can be susceptible to certain fundamental characteristics which bring him face-to-face with situations in which established practices display an insufficiency for providing mechanisms of adjustment. The second is that spiritual support can be a most important mechanism of adjustment to the aleatory and frustrating facts of these basic characteristics of the patient's existence. Also, it is not only that the ill person may have a need to be helped in this way, but that the appropriate general pattern of action in regard to the source of help is often related to evaluation by nursing and other health service personnel--who are inexpert in this field of care--of the general requirements of any patient situation. This evaluation may have important consequences regarding the completeness of patient care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nursing, with its socially embedded theory and practice, inevitably operates in the realm of power and politics. One of these political sites is that of religion, which to varying degrees continues to shape beliefs about health and illness, the delivery of healthcare services and the nurse–patient encounter. In this paper, I attempt to complicate nursing's views on religion and politics in healthcare, with the intent of thinking critically and philosophically about questions that arise at the intersection of religion, politics and nursing/healthcare. These questions include the following: What is the domain of religion and politics? How (non)religious are the contemporary societies in which nurses practice? What are the variations and implications of secularism? How is religion entangled with other intersecting social relations of power? How does a political reading of religion and politics matter to the concerns of nursing? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maclaren j. (2004) Journal of Advanced Nursing 45(5), 457–464 A kaleidoscope of understandings: spiritual nursing in a multi-faith society Spirituality is an increasingly discussed topic in nursing. In some parts of the UK there is a policy requirement to establish policies of spiritual health care which are appropriate to a multi-cultural society. In the nursing literature, spirituality is discussed from religious and secular perspectives which seem impossible to reconcile into a coherent philosophy. To discuss the relationship of spirituality to nursing and to suggest how we can think about spirituality as nurses working in a society of many faiths and cultures. Spirituality can be thought of in relation to individual patients and nurses. It also has significance for the profession of nursing and for health care as a whole. The difficulty of defining spirituality is discussed, and it is suggested that a definition of ‘spiritual nursing’ may be more achievable. Different concepts of spirituality are compared, including religious and secular spirituality. The relationship between religion and spirituality is seen as potentially problematic, with some religions denying the existence of secular spirituality. Secular spirituality and New Age movements are non-religious but spiritually influential phenomena. The problem for nursing is how to reconcile the immense variety of approaches to spirituality. The concept of spirituality as a meta-narrative is considered, and a postmodern appreciation of pluralism is employed as a way of embracing different spiritual realities. Spiritual nursing can be an opportunity for nurses to enlarge their understanding of the human condition rather than a narrowly defined concept to be applied within a model of practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]